Improving your gender balance

Improving your gender balance

Smaller technology and engineering companies in Scotland often struggle to recruit women into technical/STEM roles, and with a growing skills shortage, the ENGENDERING STEM project exists to support you to encourage more women to work for your company.

Do you work for a technology or engineering company with fewer than 250 employees? Then the new ENGENDERING STEM project wants to hear from you! There are 3 ways to get involved:

ENGENDERING STEM is an exciting pan European collaboration between Equate Scotland, City of Glasgow College, and partners in the Netherlands (VHTO) and Basque Country (Miguel Altuna), co-funded by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Union.

The project offers small to medium enterprises (SMEs) operating within the Science technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) sectors the opportunity to showcase good practice in relation to equality and diversity. In addition to this, companies can also sign-up to participate in a free-to- use online self-assessment tool and one-to-one consultation support which will identify manageable and incremental steps employers can take to improve gender balance within their business.

With a rapidly growing STEM sector across Europe, and employers reporting significant skills shortages, it is vital that we look at ways to increase the participation of women in STEM. Across the UK we need 185,000 more engineers by 2024 and we have over 12,000 digital technology vacancies per year. However, women are woefully underrepresented in these sectors making up only 9% and 18% of the workforce respectively.

In addition to addressing the growing skills gap, there are robust business, legal and moral cases for improving gender diversity in companies. We know that where there are greater levels of diversity, companies experience greater returns on investment, equity and sales. Women’s equal participation in STEM is estimated to be worth £170 million to the Scottish economy annually.